The invention relates generally to a system and method for burst licensing, particularly for use in electronic circuit design environments.
Circuit level designers typically develop electronic circuits using plans, the most commonly encountered plans being Characterization Plans and Synthesis Plans, which have much in common, although their end purpose is very different. In both cases, designers need tools to assist in characterizing and verifying the circuit (i.e. acquiring characterization results for the circuit through simulation), tools to assist visual and data processing analysis of the characterization results, tools to assist in the creation of behavioral models for a circuit, and tools to provide mechanisms that enable reuse of characterization efforts in the development of plans and for characterization of other designs.
Traditionally these tools have been supplied piecemeal, often by a variety of different manufacturers, which leads to inconsistencies and to much lost time and money as developers learn to master multiple complex systems. In addition, these tools often must be licensed for use by each designer, which greatly increases the cost of providing the tools throughout the corporation. The alternative, of not providing all of the required tools to each designer because of cost constraints, would mean that only certain designers could have access to the tools, and the entire development effort would be hampered.
A system is herein disclosed which allows for burst licensing, particularly for use in a circuit design and analysis system in which designers use a variety of tools to assist in characterizing and verifying the circuit (i.e. acquiring characterization results for the circuit through simulation). Each tool typically requires its own license to operate. Burst licensing allows tool licenses to be provided on an xe2x80x98as and when requiredxe2x80x99 basis, so as to allow system users or customers to carry out massive parallelism of the simulation tasks when run from selected tools.
By implementing a complex handshake between the simulator and the tool, the system can ensure that individual stand-alone simulation users do not get the benefit of burst licensing. As such, the burst licensing feature can be reserved for those users who have many simulations to run, for example during characterization or optimization processes.
One embodiment of the invention is particularly useful in environments that include either a circuit simulator (such as the Antrim AMS simulator, or the Antrim OmniSim simulator, both developed by Antrim Design Systems, Inc.) and/or a simulation control program (such as Antrim Aptivia, Antrim ACV, or Antrim MSS, also developed by Antrim Design Systems, Inc.). However, it will be evident to one skilled in the art that the features, benefits, and advantages of burst licensing as provided by the invention may be used in a wide variety of other environments and industries, and particularly with other simulation environments, simulation control programs, and simulator tools, in addition to those explicitly mentioned above.